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Biography
Alfred Gerald Caplin (1909-1979) was an American cartoonist with a sense of humor that captivated the nation for many years. He was also known by his pen name, Al Capp, which was created in 1949 so his name would fit in the comic frames. Capp was most well-known for his comic strip Li’l Abner featuring the amusing lives of characters from a fictional town in Appalachia.
Born in 1909, in New Haven, Connecticut, he was one of four children to Otto and Matilda Caplin. The family led a frugal and humble life due to his father’s incompletion of law school and unsuccessful career as a salesman.
A quick-witted and outgoing child, Capp started drawing cartoons as young as eleven. He dispersed his drawings throughout the neighborhood by riding his bike and dropping comics on people’s doorsteps. One day, when he was biking on the street, he was hit by a car, resulting in the amputation of his right leg above the knee. This tragedy turned his lighthearted humor into a more sardonic perspective on the world.
The family moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut when Capp was thirteen, offering new opportunities following his traumatic injury. He attended Bridgeport High School, where he did not take his studies seriously, and joked that he failed Geometry nine times.
For university, he attended a few art schools, including the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, but was never able to complete his studies because he lacked the funds to pay the tuition. In class, however, he met his future wife, Catherine Wingate Cameron, whom he married in 1929, and the couple had one son and one daughter.
In 1932, Capp’s first job was at the Associated Press, who hired him to draw Mr. Gilfeather, a boastful colonel. Capp used his comical skills to depict the character as best as he could, but unfortunately, his efforts were not adequate for the company. He was fired after a short time and decided he was better off being a ghost artist for independent cartoonists.
During this time, he was hired to draw a sequence for Joe Palooka by Ham Fischer. While working on the project, the first sketches of his renowned comic strip Li’l Abner were developed. The inspiration to depict an American southern town came from a short trip to Kentucky during the Depression Era, where poor rustics and wealthy financiers lived side by side. Capp and Fischer had many arguments over the creative direction of Li’l Abner, and due to these disputes, Capp stopped working for Fischer and took Li’l Abner to another syndicate because he recognized the potential for great popularity.
The success of the Li’l Abner comic strips began in 1934 when the Appalachian locals in the fictional town, Dogpatch, USA, were featured in The New York Mirror and several other papers.
Li’l Abner (1934-1977) featured the protagonist, Abner Yokum, a foolish rustic. Daisy Mae Scragg, a shapely damsel, determined and hard-working, pursued Abner Yokum for seventeen years until they finally got married in 1952 due to reader pressure. Together they had a child, Honest Abe, in 1953. Abner Yokum’s parents were ‘pipe-smoking’ Mammy Yokum, who was the unofficial mayor of the town, and a lazy Pappy. In Dogpatch, all the men left the hard work to the ‘wimmenfolk’.
The comic strip was intended to comment on American society and politics via satire. Abner Yokum looked like a young Henry Fonda and the character, Senator Jack S. Phogbound, was a vain and pompous Southern politician. The daily occurrences of Dogpatch also influenced American pop culture. For instance, Sadie Hawkins Day was a holiday in Dogpatch when a woman could choose any man for herself. This holiday inspired college students across America to have the girls ask the boys to dances as a role reversal.
Li’l Abner became a film in 1940 and then a Broadway musical in 1957. Two years later, a film inspired by the Broadway musical was released. Li’l Abner’s success led Capp to become a humorous TV commentator, and he also wrote humor columns for magazines.
While Capp was quite liberal in his younger years, he became more conservative in his later years. In the 1960s, he began to criticize anti-war activists and hippies, referring to students as SWINES (Students Wildly Indignant About Nearly Everything). His political stances became so strident that many newspapers would no longer work with him. These tensions, accusations of sexual harassment, and his advancing age brought Li’l Abner to its end in 1977, forcing Capp’s retirement.
Al Capp died November 5, 1979, at seventy years old in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after battling obesity and emphysema due to smoking.
Despite these challenges, his humor entertained and inspired readers for more than four decades; author John Steinbeck once commented that Capp should have received a Nobel Prize. His legacy carries on today due to his undeniable talent as a humorist, artist, and satirist.
“Al Capp as A. G. Caplin Mister Gilfeather aka Colonel Gilfeather Daily Single Panel Comic Strip.” ArtNet. Accessed January 17, 2025. https://www.artnet.com/artists/al-capp/al-capp-as-a-g-caplin-mister-gilfeather-ak-aa-eOervtV3yJc_cCuWLYO9fg2.
“Al Capp.” Encyclopædia Britannica, February 20, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Al-Capp.
Dooley, Michael. “Li’l Abner’s Al Capp: A Monstrous Creature, a Masterful Cartoonist.” PRINT Magazine, March 4, 2013. https://www.printmag.com/design-books/lil-abner-al-capp-monster-cartoonist/.
Kuiper, Kathleen. “Li’l Abner.” Encyclopædia Britannica, May 27, 2013. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lil-Abner-comic-strip-by-Capp.
Shenker, Israel. “A1 Capp, Creator of Li’1 Abner, Is Dead at 70.” The New York Times, November 6, 1979. https://www.nytimes.com/1979/11/06/archives/al-capp-creator-of-lil-abner-is-dead-at-70-burdens-of-wealth.html.
Essay by Halle Davies. A curatorial intern at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Davies is currently studying art history at Regent’s University in London, England. She also participated in the Gap Year Program at London’s Sotheby’s Institute of Art.
